- 8.3% average globally doesn't necessarily represent 8.3% of your users or market.
- 8.3% is almost much larger than the metric you actually care about -- the percentage of users that will not use Chrome (or your desired set of supported browsers).
Of course, I used that figure because it’s what the poster used. I looked up what it is for the product I work on and it’s actually only 4% — still an order of magnitude larger than it would need to be to consider not supporting it.
The desired set of supported browsers will always come down to metrics.
That number should grow again. It's becoming increasingly obvious what a privacy leak Chrome is, and Firefox is just as good, making it an obvious choice for anyone who cares about privacy.
Mozilla (Firefox) management thought that installing a Mr Robot advert extension on people's computers, without asking, was a good move, and defended it until the internet outcry got loud enough. With management like that, I find it hard to trust them. Default-installing Pocket was also not entirely defensible and was probably money-driven.
Essentially, both companies have done anti-privacy and untrustworthy actions, and choosing the lesser evil is hardly ideal.
The difference between Mozilla and Google is substantial. Whenever Mozilla gets this wrong it is usually a goof of sorts, when Google gets it wrong it tends to be policy. See 'AMP'.
It felt sluggish because they were forced to use the Metro UI toolkit. Had they used Win32, it would have blown Firefox and maybe Chrome out of the water.
I was historically a Windows user and started my career as a Windows sysadmin for a few years—I switched to macOS for a few years and came back as it became increasingly buggy and Microsoft's development story changed.
The complaints seem to come from heavily technical folks that think LTSB branches are reasonable things for normal people to run. I wouldn't want to run one on my own machine.
Sure, it's Windows 10 without any of the cruft—but also, none of the good bits. Believe it or not, but the Windows Store is great; managed updates of everything from Slack to Spotify, without individual updater components. Photos app, with support for HEIC files and so on, built in. These things are actually useful!
The missteps were W8-8.1 and WS2012. W10 and W2012R2 and beyond have been much better. Not perfect, but leagues better than the those disastrous years between.
Remember when Windows Server 2012 didn't have a start menu button, but instead a pixel? I hope someone was fired for that blunder.
Oh man, I'll tell you—Windows 8 was a beast of its own. I think that is how people remember Windows, and assume that Windows 10 is the same. But god, don't remind me of that awful full-screen server start menu..............I remember that's when we actively started to try and go full headless with Windows Server, but it was also half-baked back then.
I was a windows guy, then did the "I got a mac and never looked back" and now I'm back on windows 10 and, yes I'm pissed off, but this comment is pretty well realistic.
People have a tendency to say "never" when you really shouldn't say never.
addons.mozilla.org also contains Google Analytics. And since addons are not allowed to act on addons.mozilla.org, you have no choice but to ping Google every time you load a page there.
Mozilla is either stupid or ill-intentioned. It's 2019 so they've lost the benefit of the doubt for me.
There is in fact a third option, which happens to be their stated position.
Part of their (written) agreement with Google is that none of the analytics data generated from Mozilla properties will contribute towards Google's tracking database.
"Mozilla has a legal contract with Google that prevents them from using our Google Analytics data for mining or from sharing it with third parties, among other privacy-protecting provisions."
"Mozilla went through a year long legal discussion with GA before we would ever implement it on our websites. GA had to provide how and what they stored and we would only sign a contract with them if they allowed Mozilla to opt-out of Google using the data for mining and 3rd parties."
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
Great if you trust Google, not so much if you don't. Too bad Mozilla made that choice for us, and imho, the wrong one. Google has proved itself time and time again that they cannot be trusted with privacy.
"Mozilla went through a year long legal discussion with GA."
I wonder why. Implementing some basic analytics on a few pages shouldn't be that hard.
"Great if you trust Google, not so much if you don't. Too bad Mozilla made that choice for us, and imho, the wrong one. Google has proved itself time and time again that they cannot be trusted with privacy."
I believe this to be a lazy and ignorant opinion, and I think you are hoping no one will call you out for this.
"Google has proved time and time against they cannot be trusted with privacy". This is a contract between two businesses, which carries legal weight (and in some countries, carries more legal weight than just contract law), so could you source for me perhaps 2-3 (you said "time and time again", so 2-3 should be quite easy!) of your most iconic times that Google openly violated contract terms with major organizations regarding privacy controls?
Remember when they were "unintentionally" scanning and saving wifi data?
Broke the law.
If Google has a culture of "grab all the data, and use it in whatever way you can figure out to make money,"—and they do—then the real question is if they even have the institutional capability to not accidentally use this data the same way they use all the other data they have.
>"Remember when they were "unintentionally" scanning and saving wifi data? Broke the law."
I don't want to be a broken record of "this opinion sounds lazy and under-researched and I'm calling you out" but.....
* Google was cleared of wrongdoing under the Wire Tap Act after an investigation by federal law enforcement
* The wifi data capture was a 20% time engineer project which rolled out unintentionally, was never commingled with other data, and was destroyed without being used
* The DoJ and Federal Court of Appeals disagree on the details and the Supreme Court of the United States refused a petition to clarify any parts, so any assertion that they "Broke the law" is either ignorant or malicious, IMO, because to summarize a situation where law enforcement said "No law breaking " and an Appeals court said "Maybe law breaking" as "Law Breaking" can't be considered a rational and intellectual attempt at understanding
While Google does collect a lot of data, the culture is to guard it rather zealously. Google has a lot of lawyers and all projects have to get a privacy review. The privacy folks take their jobs seriously. There is mandatory training about when you need a privacy review. There are a lot of internal rules and technologies built to guard security and privacy. There are researchers looking into ways to learn from data on mobile devices without actually collecting it. The security people are probably the best in the business. And so on.
Some of the procedures were put in place after the wifi scanning incident.
And that's not to say bad things can't still happen. One thing that sounded particularly bad about the now-cancelled Dragonfly project was that they were allegedly avoiding privacy review. This project was being kept secret from the rest of the company because it's not how things are usually done.
So, my guess as an ex-Googler is that they can guard it and probably will, at least under normal conditions.
We wouldn't know, since most of the incidents would never see the light. From the incidents that did come to light (e.g. Google spying on you through its assistant), we do know that they can and will bend the letter of the law to suit their purpose. So I think that it's your opinion that sounds hopelessly naive rather than OP's.
Most of the cases of Google "spying through home assistant" (along with the other assistants, Amazon, Apple included) while obviously invasions of privacy were generally (all?) legal.
At least in the US they weren't breaking any laws. I'm not saying they would never break any laws for financial gain, just that most of the breaches in privacy aren't technically illegal (thus the need for privacy laws)
It is pretty unlikely that a company (Google) would break a contract with another relatively large organisation (Mozilla). Yes, Google vacuum up all your data and do shady stuff with it, but only because all of it is legal.
Plus, the amount of data that they get from Mozilla must be tiny compared to the amount of data that they collect through their search engine: it's only data on mozilla.org, not data of everyone that uses the browser at all times. It is not wise to risk a lawsuit over it.
> I wonder why. Implementing some basic analytics on a few pages shouldn't be that hard.
Maybe defining a contract to prevent use of Mozilla data without loopholes is harder.
It’s not entirely one sided as you describe. Google is one of the few companies that has also fought legal requests from governments trying to spy on their citizens, when the others giants caved immediately.
One of the things Google gets right. They know that data breaches, where someone does get the valuable ad profiles or data of Google users (while usually advertisers just get to target based off the data), are one of the few things that will actually cause the masses to think about their privacy settings and why they're giving Google their life story at all.
Which requires the user to trust Google to a) honor that agreement (somewhat simple, though we don't know the actual terms, i.e. what's on the line for Google) and b) not have bugs in their systems that accidentally leak information (to their own profiling services or third parties), and if they trust them on this, why not trust them in general when it comes to "we won't use your information for anything nefarious". Anti-Ad/Tracking-Plugins being among the most popular suggests that a lot of Mozilla's users don't want to rely on trust.
My bank argues the same way and uses Google Analytics to track their visitors, including inside the online banking system. Fine, so they trust Google to honor agreements and not connect profiles, but I'd still prefer Google to simply not know when and how often I'm logging in to check my account balance.
It's good that Mozilla goes the extra mile to get a custom contract, but I believe that most people aren't expecting a self-proclaimed privacy champion to use an anti-privacy-service by one of the largest corporate enemies of privacy. Explicit opt-in would be the right thing to do here.
If you personally want to opt out then use a content blocker? There's also an official way to completely opt out of GA, but this basically does the same thing.
Privacy isn't a zero sum game, there can be improvements.
What's the point? Why does Mozilla exist? If Google is good enough mozilla.org should redirect to google.com/chrome.
If Google is not going enough, Mozilla shouldn't use Google for analytics on the add-ons page when there are plenty of other options and an opportunity to do something valuable by building a site-private analytics product as part of their core mission of protecting the web.
According to the issues trackers, various forms of "self-hosting would be more work for a lesser product".
I'm not sure that would still be the case if the decision were being made today, and would quietly hope not, but I guess we can charitably say that the reason now is "inertia".
Personally, I think they may have underestimated (or failed to fully predict) the anti-google, pro-privacy sentiment in the wings, and it's clear even from this thread and the issues on bugzilla that it's probably cost them enough privacy-capital at this stage to have justified the extra work required to self-host.
But hindsight is 20-20. There are sunk costs now which also must play into the decisions.
Definitely not, but I can see how it might be useful to know aggregates of the Firefox version and locale information for people visiting that particular page.
> Personally, I think they may have underestimated (or failed to fully predict) the anti-google, pro-privacy sentiment in the wings, and it's clear even from this thread and the issues on bugzilla that it's probably cost them enough privacy-capital at this stage to have justified the extra work required to self-host.
Or maybe the "anti-google, pro-privacy sentiment" isn't really all that big. Could be a relatively small but vocal set of people.
> self-hosting would be more work for a lesser product".
The same argument applies to the whole of Firefox. It's more work and it's a lesser product. If Firefox can be a better product, than Mozilla Analytics could be too.
At this point it's clear that Mozilla is a business (with well paid management and staff) like Google that is using Privacy as a promo like Google used Don't Be Evil.
Mozilla might be better in practice today, but it's not on a principled foundation. It looks like a Google Lite - Firefox vs Chrome, Rust vs Go, etc.
We use this one, paid version. Sometimes it's a slower load, the UI is less good than GA, other little issues but we still get the core data, and can trap page-level-events.
No law can prevent a thing, no written agreement can prevent cheating. Law can only set out that such cheating might be illegal in the sense that it can be argued in court that penalties should apply.
I do see the point that you are making, and clearly prevents is not absolutely true, but the beauty of open companies like Mozilla is that this information is available at all. In an issue tracker no less.
We can be a little more charitable in not demanding legalese from someone who was casually paraphrasing somebody else, given the context (a bug report).
Sorry, ironically I didn't mean to imply openness in any legal sense (although the foundation itself is publicly accountable in terms of what they spend their money on).
Open companies was probably a bad term to use because it might imply something beyond most/all(?) of their products being developed in the open, but I think the point stands well enough regardless.
I won't edit now, but please read my original "open" as "open source".
>No law can prevent a thing, no written agreement can prevent cheating. Law can only set out that such cheating might be illegal in the sense that it can be argued in court that penalties should apply.
This is asinine stuff. Contract law is one of the oldest parts of the legal system and contracts are protected. Violating contract terms leads to a discussion of damages. It's not about illegal contracts, it's about liability and damages.
No one before you was talking about "illegal contracts". You misread what you replied to. Contracts don't prevent things. Contracts determine (sometimes indefinite, but not infinite) prices for actions.
If you trust Google to always uphold its contract, than by the same logic you should trust the government to never abuse your encryption keys.
But we don't, because insider access is (eventually) outsider access. Bits don't have color.
And I'm explicitly rejecting the theoretical discussion of "contracts not preventing things", a somewhat useful model of legal thinking for first year law students to understand one aspect, but an absolutely atrocious model for a layperson to understand general contract law.
This is like saying criminal law doesn't prevent crime, which again under some literalist and pointless definition sure a murderer isn't physically prevented from murder by a law, but the punishment of murderers does prevent many people from becoming murderers.
Similarly, contract law influences the behavior of people who agree to them by establishing damages and liabilities for various situations, and these incentives influence and control normal actors in predictable ways. A summary of the influences and controls on normal actors in contract negotiation could be "contracts prevent things".
My contract with my ISP prevents me from reselling my bandwidth to my neighbors. It doesn't physically prevent me, but it establishes a liability for me that I want to avoid.
My contract with my car insurance company prevents me from working for Uber. It doesn't physically prevent me from clicking Sign Up in the Uber app, but it establishes limits on my coverage such that I would be driving illegally if I were to continue, and I want to avoid that, so the contract prevents me from doing it.
Let's not be naive. The Big Brother agenda of Google didn't happen in a vacuum. They have government support and protection from some factions of our intelligence agencies to this day (although, perhaps not for much longer). The whole original concept of "Google" as a search engine (and tracking app) was originally a program of DARPA (same for Facebook - originally called "LifeLog"). Do you really think they cut all ties with the government when they went public? Neither Google or Facebook are what they appear to be.
"Privacy" in the sense that it pertains to selling your info to advertisers is just a sideshow; i.e. not the real problem.
> Violating contract terms leads to a discussion of damages.
No, being found in a court of law to have done so does, but when the contract terms are easy to violate without the other party being aware it is especially inaccurate to portray this as the violation itself leading to this result.
Thank God that Google is such trustworthy company on which we can depend with all our data and personal information. The company that would never deal with likes of China. The company which would never expose data of Google+ customers. The company which is always transparent with its policies and usage of user provided data.
> The company that would never deal with likes of China.
This is disingenuous. They basically locked themselves out of China voluntarily many years ago. They're really scary otherwise and I agree with you, but don't lessen your point by including exaggerations, in my opinion.
> Part of their (written) agreement with Google is that none of the analytics data generated from Mozilla properties will contribute towards Google's tracking database.
Then pirate it. What do you care? This is like pirating a show they refuse to put on Netflix. They don't give you the option to conveniently buy what you want, so pirate it.
Pirate KMS servers will go offline eventually right? Even if the legality isn’t a concern, the reliability and maintenance overhead is a problem. There are trust/malware concerns with client-side cracks as well.
If you want to skip straight to the piracy, here's an open source package for you, complete with keys, hosted ironically on Microsoft servers, that uses vlmcsd: https://github.com/ekistece/vlmcsd-autokms
It's a pretty clever hack. It runs the KMS emulator locally and fakes the network connection with a TAP device from OpenVPN. Works perfectly.
Sure, if you want to run a recent game, or one that's graphics-intensive, yeah, it might not run well enough for you on wine, and you'll need to dual-boot.
Personally, I don't have that kind of problem, and I suspect I'm not alone. Of the games I play that don't have Linux ports, they run well enough under wine, even on my (recent) laptop with Intel graphics. But I'm a pretty casual gamer, and honestly find it rare that I just must play the type of games that require a high-end Windows rig.
NVIDIA ones. I tried with proprietary, MESA and Nouveau. Never managed to get the same experience as on Windows.
It's a shame, because it literally can't be anything but the software. It's the same hardware with different OSes.
Might even be windows specific optimizations on the games part, but in the end it doesn't matter.
The bottom line unfortunately is: it's significantly worse.
I wonder if you are actually using the nvidia driver or just installed it. You could trivially have installed the nvidia driver but actually be using nouveau. Running glxinfo in a terminal would probably be informative.
The complexity of setting this up would be a good point to address. Linux Mint for example has a tool to do this for you. This is logically a workaround for nvidia actually contributing an open source driver that doesn't suck.
There is a supposedly much better supported open source driver for new AMD hardware as well. Another thing the community is doing.
If the problem is with the closed source driver there isn't much the community can do. It's very hard to reverse engineer a complex device like a gpu. If the problem isn't games in general but that particular game there again isn't much the community can do.
That one hasn't gone offline in years, so I've never thought of this. Perhaps you are right, but I assume that it should be easy enough to find new ones if you need them. I wouldn't consider this approach to be "high maintenance".
Is this supposed to sound as nonsensical as those 90s "You wouldn't DOWNLOAD a CAR!" anti-piracy posters, or is this just a pleasant side effect of your poor analogy?
If I had billions in the bank and you gave detailed instructions on how to pick up the breadcrumbs I leave on the table of a restaurant, I wouldn't give a shit. But if they care so much they are welcome to break into my house and take my computer
You'd need to emulate/simulate/shim all the graphics calls and state changes, but that shouldn't have any bearing on the actual code architecture. In fact, given that Dolphin uses a JIT, you could argue that this already happens to some degree when you're playing Gamecube games, having the source just allows ahead-of-time compilation.
Same reason we have OLAP and OLTP systems. Same reason it makes sense for some use cases to set up a Hadoop cluster, and for others to have a single but fast CPU: some tasks can be run in parallel, others can't.
You can calculate the value of each screen pixel without knowing the value of the others. To calculate the n value of a fibonnaci sequence you have to calculate the n-1 and n-2 values first, so it doesn't matter how many cores do you have. Gpus are for the former and CPUs for the latest.
GPUs are made to execute a limited set of the same operations operation on on a huge amount of data in parallel. This is a totally different workload than your usual computer programs, that commonly have a long and complicated series of commands. Thus just translating your program 1:1 to your GPU computer would make it way slower. Your GPU runs probably around ~1.5GHz, a third of your CPUs. The GPU does have a few thousand cores that run in parallel while our consumer CPUs does have at best a dozen (that are more capable than any single GPU core), but most of those are often already idle, since it's a lot of work to make your software take advantage of them. For some tasks it's worth it, and those take advantage of e.g. you GPU.
Circuits don't operate at speed of light, though. People like to say this over and over again, but electron mobility through a circuit is only around 2/3s the speed of light, IIRC. They may have very tiny mass, but they still have mass.
No, it's the electromagnetic field which propagates at around 2/3c in the conductor. The electron drift velocity is on the order of a fraction of a mm/s.
Sweden has a big history with .nu (“now” in Swedish) and .se seems to be taken by a local business. Doesn’t seem to have stopped kfc.com from trying to redirect to kfc.se though when clicking on the “take me to my local site” button, oops.
